everyone say hello to my chaotic pile of overthought estimations and willy-nilly vibe checks
biomes! rough idea of the kinda foliage to be found
köppen climate classification map (color key slightly off but you get the idea) (i basically merged a lot of different tutorial results to get this one)
rough culture map with weird labels i’ve put on the “culture clusters” (areas separated by difficult travel circumstances like rough terrain, drastic biome changes, etc) the colors/types take into account things like crop and travel availability ! lots of people are still hunter-gathering and this world is pretty pre-industrial
elevations and tectonic plates! and volcanic hot spots!
the visions of a madman with a hobby. :3 most of this is because too indecisive to fully ‘wing it’ with worldbuilding on this kinda scale, so i wanted starting bases for ideas. and then i can make CREATURES and CHARACTERS to sprinkle around it!
This is gonna be a long one and you know it’s serious because I’m gonna try to use punctuation/capitalization for once
Context: For starters, this is the various layers and steps behind my Myths In The Wild world map, using the worldbuilding guide by Madeline James (youtube playlist found here, although there’s also a text version on her website). Everything here is approximations, to say the least. It took me a few tries and many iterations to get it close to what I envisioned originally, so… if memory serves me right, I’ve ended up at version “3.7” of my map? Oof.
Anyways, time to get into it.
I began by looking over my old maps again, which by this point I hadn’t touched in over a year. (You can find them in this old post of mine!)
Then began the process of… well, basically starting over. For one, I didn’t account for ANY map distortion with my continents originally. In an attempt to offset this, I put my landmasses on a slightly-less-drastic Robinson Projection. Not perfect, but a step in the right direction.
Then, following over where I had placed mountain ranges, I drew tectonic plates and their directions. Following Madeline’s guide, I also noted the intensity of the plates’ movements and hot spots/mantle plumes under the crust (volcanic islands!)
Next came elevations:
And then… the more complex “invisible” parts. Pressure cells, messy wind directions, and ocean currents. These got a little tricky because they vary with the seasons (winter solstice in the northern hemisphere, summer in the south, and vice versa) so there’s technically two versions of each.
First, the North Summer/South Winter maps:
Aaand the North Winter/South Summer maps:
Next came temperatures and precipitation (NS/SW and NW/SS order again)
Which, with their powers combined, give us info for humidity/aridity!
Now for… climates… this is where things got messy for me.
This is probably on account of me not being the best at absorbing instructional info and overthinking phrasings, and nothing against the guide itself. I just struggled a LOT with this, and ended up with weird gaps in the climate zones no matter how precise I thought I was with clipping layers, lasso tools, etc. I even found other tutorials and tried to overlap the results to find commonalities. It, uh, wasn’t pretty.
I eventually went through the entire map, the one using Madeline’s guide only, and manually circled each blank spot to fill in the gaps. Because I’m stubborn and had too much free time, I suppose.
Which gave me these step by step köppen climate maps: the messy original, the patched holes, and the cleanup edits. The third also stretched out the tropic zones, as in a later step of the guide the aridity is brought up and the tropics are tweaked to account for between-seasons rains, if that makes any sense. Anyways, here’s the maps:
I was… still not really satisfied with it. It still felt too arid, to me? But I didn’t want to return to step one. Instead I returned to step three, actually, where Madeline’s guide has a “climate shortcuts” section. And thus I hatched an evil scheme to combine the maps.
With the shortcuts version, it all looked a little too neat and tidy.
So… I overlayed it onto the previous map, distorted the hell out of it with a liquify tool, patched up the messy bits, and got… this!
My final map of wretched approximations that I’ve decided to stick with since!
It’s rendered some of the previous “invisible” steps inaccurate probably, but I’m willing to make that sacrifice. I now have a map to lay the proper groundwork for my setting! HOORAY!
Finally, FINALLY I could move on to more steps! I continued following the guide, mapping out weather types and river basins!
The rivers will most likely need a rework soon, since they probably don’t match up with the new and improved climate map. But the drainage divides themselves are still accurate… probably…
Then, combining previous info from climate, precipitation, aridity, and other maps: biomes!!! This one took many iterations as well, since I’d actually done biomes before revamping the climates map. So here’s the before and after:
And there it is folks! This map has come a long LONG way from its original renditions
A lot more detailed, and lot more foundation to it than I originally stuck myself with. Improvements all around! Functionality-wise, that is. I still want to make a more “flavorful” weathered map like this one o these days.
Anyways, thank you for reading! This passion project has been a wild ride and I’m excited to be working on it again :3
I’ll be making another post soon(?) about the rest of the steps in the guide I followed, namely the geology and then cultural info! Stay tuned! Yippee!
anyways ive been going tunnel-vision on doing a map revamp for the past couple weeks (months?) and its going great, ive got koppen climates and everything 🔥
the amount of layers is a bit insane though
shoutout to Artifexian’s youtube videos and Madeline James’s worldbuilding blog posts, i would have died badly without those map guides 👍
WOOPS I DIED BC I’VE BEEN MOVING AND WE DONT HAVE WIFI HERE YET !!!! anyways here’s a recording of some hasty Continental Drift i animated last night yippee
since this is a specbio + fantasy setting, i wanna find ways to make the arcane feel like its got as much of an ecosystem as the physical world.
gods and monsters that operate through exchange and hunger and cycles, gods where domains are like ecological niches. even the “good” (not really accurate to ascribe basic moralities here, but yknow. “perceived as positive/non-hostile”) entities work on logic akin to magnus archives fears or the gods and saints of silt verses… and OOOOUH im so excited to create different systems of gods/spirits
for instance >:) i’ve been using my diy prompt-generators n cards to brainstorm one particular region’s belief systems/magic…
what if gods were living things. what if these gods required food and medicine just as much as any other being. what if the gods could be sought for pacts and promises of protection but in turn needed to be healed of their metaphysical wounds after. what if the gods were supporting pillars and rivers beneath the land itself. what if the gods were worshipped through travel, through familiarity with the land’s give and take. what if the gods were beings of duality. what if the shorthand for divinity in art was to depict them as a pair of beings, two parts of the same whole.
anyways im cooking 👍 or trying to. more like a slow simmer that could turn into a fire at any moment. but its something!
i'm a bit late to making a pinned post, but here we go!
Welcome to my blog! Here i'll post occasional rambles and updates about my current project, Myths in the Wild (former joke title of "my way or the highway"/MWotHW)
MitW is my post-apocalyptic fantasy setting with LOTS of speculative biology/evolution and sprinklings of horror. I've been working on various iterations of this setting since ~2018, but began chipping away at the current(ish) version circa 2024!
The current branches of this project include:
The setting itself (maps, creatures, etc!)
A work-in-progress TTRPG i'd like to share someday
A custom oracle deck (using standard playing cards)
Possibly some short-stories and characters in a sort of anthology style, we'll see :3
Main Tags: #mitw project, #rambles, #rb, #others art
(Will add more tagging stuff later, but the rest is hopefully self-explanatory for now)
